OS X Webserver

I am helping an IT team that is having a problem with their OS X Leopard webserver and an ssl certificate.

A couple of months ago the server hard drive crashed and they rebuilt the server. The server is only hosting their website and no dns. The logs are showing that the host name does not match the certificate.

fix the hostname of the server. part of the ssl cert validation is looking at the name in the cert being sent and the name you're using to connect to the server. for example. let's say that you have a cert that is used to validate www.example.com with a real name of webserver.example.com. You would be able to connect to the webpage using either name successfully; however, if you connect using webserver.example.com it'll complain the hostname doesn't match because the cert is validating www.example.com, not webserver.example.com thus a discrepancy.

you have a couple options.

1) rename the server to use the name in the cert
2) add a CNAME DNS record to point to the new name
OR just create a new A record that points to the server IP directly

The dns is hosted externally i.e. example.com. The certificate has the host1.example.com. Renaming the server to "host1"alone would correct this issue? Do I need to have an internal dns server configured?Picture-3.png

possibly. when a user goes to the site host1.example.com the site presents an ssl cert and that cert has a name in it. my guess of what happened is that when it was rebuilt the cert wasn't recreated and signed by a cert authority using the host1.example.com name but rather the name of the server it was configured with.

the cert is what needs to be fixed, not necessarily the hostname. i haven't done ssl cert generation on osx before. i just raised the changing of the hostname on the server to be the cert as sometimes the cert will be auto regenerated for the new name. pry not in this case though

so what you need to do is generate a new cert on the server and for the "common name" when filling in all the info you need to put host1.example.com. you then need to create a cert req that will be sent to verisign or whomever you want to have sign your cert for trustworthness (whomever did the original before the crash) unless it is self signed of course. then load the new private/public key pair into the web server. after that you'll be fine.

they want to keep the host1.example .com on the certificate. Its changing the name on the server is the problem. Its called server.local.

On a test server osx server my current hostname server01.test.com and dns hostname server01.test.com match. I have a dns server installed and configured and the servers dns points to the ip address of the server.

Is this how we should configure the production server in order for the ssl certificate to work correctly?

yes. so when you type https://host1.example.com/ into the browser, you can see an icon somewhere that gives you access to view the properties of the ssl cert the site uses. that cert should have a common name associated with it of host1.example.com. even if its something small like visiting the page https://host1/ without the domain name it won't match the certificate and will cause an error to be presented.

Periodically we have to update or add SSL certificates for customers. Depending upon your hosting plan you may be responsible for the installation and/or key generation. In the wake of Heartbleed many sites were forced to re-key.
We will concen…

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